Communications over a network between two computers, for example a client and a server, can be implemented using a variety of known communication protocols and encryption, such as SSL, may be used to provide secure network communications. Although the communication is secure, the encryption of the network traffic increases the size of the network packets, which can cause the packet payload to become too large for a single packet. This can result in packet fragmentation, causing more overhead for communication processing. Techniques for adjusting the maximum size of a packet to account for encryption overhead would be useful.